Opening Bazin

Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife

Edited by Dudley Andrew and with Herve Joubert-Laurencin

Features contributions from renowned film scholars such as Tom Gunning, Noa Steimatsky, Colin MacCabe, and others

Provides a wide-ranging assessment of Bazin and his legacy, showcasing his global influence on postwar film criticism

Discusses an eclectic group of films and filmmakers, including works by Charlie Chaplin, Chris Marker, Francois Truffaut, and Henri Clouzot

Opening Bazin

Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife

Edited by Dudley Andrew and with Herve Joubert-Laurencin

Description

With the full range of his voluminous writings finally viewable, André Bazin seems more deserving than ever to be considered the most influential of all writers on film. His brief career, 1943-58, helped bring about the leap from classical cinema to the modern art of Renoir, Welles, and neorealism. Founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, he encouraged the future New Wave directors to confront his telltale question, What is Cinema? This collection considers another vital question, Who is Bazin? In it, thirty three renowned film scholars--including de Baecque, Elsaesser, Gunning, and MacCabe--tackle Bazin's meaning for the 2st century. They have found in his writings unmistakable traces of Flaubert, Bergson, Breton, and Benjamin and they have pursued this vein to the gold mine
of Deleuze and Derrida. They have probed and assessed his ideas on film history, style, and technique, measuring him against today's media regime, while measuring that regime against him. They have located the precious ore of his thought couched within striations of French postwar politics and culture, and they have revealed the unexpected effects of that thought on filmmakers and film culture on four continents. Open Bazin; you will find a treasure.

Opening Bazin

Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife

Edited by Dudley Andrew and with Herve Joubert-Laurencin

Table of Contents

A Binocular Preface, Dudley Andrew and Herve Joubert-LaurencinAcknowledgmentsPart One: Lineage 1. A Bazinian Half-Century, Thomas Elsaesser2. Cinema Across Fault Lines: Bazin and the French School of Geography, Ludovic Cortade3. Evolution and Event in Qu'est-ce que le cinema?, Tom Conley4. The Reality of Hallucination in Andre Bazin, Jean-Francois Chevrier5. Beyond the Image in Benjamin and Bazin: The Aura of the Event, Monica Dall'Asta6. Bazin as Modernist, Colin MacCabe7. Film and Plaster: The Mold of History, Jean-Michel Frodon8. From Bazin to Deleuze: A Matter of Depth, Diane Arnaud9. Deconstruction avant la lettre: Jacques Derrida Before Andre Bazin, Louis-Georges SchwartzPart Two:Aesthetics 10. Belief in Bazin, Philip Rosen11. The World in Its Own Image: The Myth of Total Cinema, Tom Gunning12. The Afterlife of Superimposition, Daniel Morgan13. The Difference of Cinema in the System of the Arts, Angela Dalle Vacche14. Malraux, Bazin, and the Gesture of Picasso, Dudley Andrew15. Incoherent Spasms and the Dignity of Signs: Bazin's Bresson, Noa Steimatskky16. Animals: an Adventure in Bazin's Ontology, Seung-hoon Jeong17. Bazin's Exquisite Corpses, Ivone Margulies18. Rewriting the Image: Two Effects of the Future-Perfect in Andre Bazin, Herve Joubert-LaurencinPart Three: Historical Moment 19. The Eloquent Image: The Postwar Mission of Film and Criticism, Philip Watts20. Bazin in Combat, Antoine deBaecque21. Bazin the Censor?, Marc Vernet22. Waves of Crisis in French Cinema, Jeremi Szaniawski23. Bazin's Chaplin Myth and the Corrosive Lettrists, Rochelle Frack24. Radical Ambitions in Postwar French Documentary, Steven Ungar25. Bazin on the Margins of the Seventh Art, Grant Wiedenfeld26. Television and the Auteur in the Late '50s, Michael Cramer27. Andre Bazin's Bad Taste, James TweediePart Four: Worldwide Influence 28. Montage Under Suspicion: Bazin's Russo-Soviet Reception, John MacKay29. From Ripples to Waves: Bazin in Eastern Europe, Alice Lovejoy30. Bazin in Brazil: A Welcome Visitor, Ismail Xavier31. Bazin and the Politics of Realism in Mainland China, Cecile Lagesse32. Japanese Readings: Textual
Thread, Kan Nozaki33. Japanese Lessons: Bazin's Cinematic Cosmopolitanism, Ryan Cook

Opening Bazin

Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife

Edited by Dudley Andrew and with Herve Joubert-Laurencin

Author Information

Dudley Andrew is R. Selden Rose Professor of Film and Comparative Literature at Yale University. He is the author of numerous publications, including What Cinema Is! and Mists of Regret: Culture and Sensibility in Classic French Film.

Hervé Joubert-Laurencin is a leading authority in France on Bazin and the author of Pasolini: Portrait du poete en cineaste and La lettre volante: Quatre essais sur le cinema d'animation.

Opening Bazin

Postwar Film Theory and Its Afterlife

Edited by Dudley Andrew and with Herve Joubert-Laurencin

Reviews and Awards

Winner of the SCMS Best Edited Collection Award

"This amazing collection, whose contributors are some of the most distinguished contemporary film scholars, rescues Bazin from the ossified stereotypes that have come to define him in film pedagogy--realism vs. formalism, depth of field vs. editing, humanism vs. Marxism. It sheds light on the complexities and intricacies of the Bazin oeuvre in all its diversity and delineates the ways in which his work illuminates the definitive impact of film as an art in the 20th century."--Mary Ann Doane, Brown University

"Elegantly moving across disciplines, history, theory and geography, the essays in Opening Bazin construct an invaluable and vivid picture of Bazin as film theorist, film critic and engaged intellectual. It seems throughout to amount to more than the study of one man. However its richness and diversity is derived from those qualities in Bazin himself, so just as the book transcends its subject, he himself returns not only as its generative figure but also as an emblem of the peculiar and elusive nature of the cinema itself."--Laura Mulvey, Birbeck, University of London